THE BOOK VERSION OF the 1619 Project was published on November 16, 2021, and the same period also witnessed the birth of a new genre of critical essay, written while The 1619 Project was in press but responding not to the book but to the August 18, 2019 special issue of the New York Times Magazine that it supersedes
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SINCE PLATYPUS IS A PROJECT primarily concerned with the question of Marxism and the Left, other questions lay close at hand: what is psychoanalysis? Why should the Left take interest in it? What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism?
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PROFESSOR HOLTON appears to believe that my entire critique of the 1619 project boiled down to a “demand that it make the Black History Month compromise of showcasing black heroes instead of white oppressors”
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KARL KAUTSKY WAS RIGHT. The general term “imperialism” describes a set of policies and practices which facilitate the domination of one political entity over another.
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I HAVE ARGUED THAT the 1619 Project failed to acknowledge the decades of scholarship that has made all U.S. historians acutely aware of the significance of slavery and racism. I have expressed particular concern that the Project misconstrues the nature of the slave economy, of cotton production, and the relationship between capitalism and slavery.
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